Conversations we otherwise wouldn’t dare begin

              We were gathered in a circle in the main hall of St. Columb’s House today. John Harkin shared his introduction to Hands for a Bridge and we shared how the program has been meaningful to us.

              John has already explained why he doesn’t plan ahead, because plans go afoul whereas, if you go with the flow, things tend to work out.

              In 2006, in October, John received an email from Doug, a mental health worker at Roosevelt. He read it poorly but saw Seattle, students, February visit, and wrote back Yes, of course. Had he actually read the message and seen that Roosevelt was asking to visit for over a week and needed places to stay, John would surely have said, Sorry, there’s no way. In the next few months, Doug would call the school, but John would never make himself available. By January, Doug was more insistent: There’s a man from Seattle on the line for you, and he says he won’t hang up until you’ve actually spoken. When John spoke with Doug and realized what he’d actually agreed to those many months ago, he simply said, Yes, yes; it’s all arranged; I just need to work out the fine details. Then he rushed students into the library and said, Americans are coming in only two weeks and need sixteen homes for multiple days and I need volunteers and family permissions by tomorrow. Sixteen hands came up. And the next day, the sixteen permission forms.

              When things are meant to be, they will be.

              Since then, Roosevelt has come back every year, save the last three. And John has brought students from Northern Ireland three separate years—2007, 2009, and 2012. And in both schools, John said, things are done differently because of leadership and legacy of Hands for a Bridge experiences, similar to the trees we planted the other day in Ness Woods. Small changes are meaningful.

              For our part, many spoke about closeness and trust among an unlikely variety of students; they spoke about stretching their comfort zones and their confidence pushing out of them due to the program. Chloe spoke about the expansion of empathy she gained over the classroom readings by actually meeting people in the conflict zones we studied. It’s a wisdom she knows will extrapolate. And I spoke about what it’s meant as a teacher to plan readings and experiences for a class in collaboration with decades of experience and rituals and mission among people across three continents for whom they’re deeply meaningful.

              Halle asked John what value comes from Americans being included in these tense conversations that might have more meaningful dialogue partners locally. John told her that our presence provides an occasion to speak about subjects that wouldn’t come about otherwise. Students here who wouldn’t set foot in the Free Derry Museum do so because they’re going with us. And at Roosevelt, a visitor from Northern Ireland asked, Why is everyone here at Roosevelt so racist, pointing to the completely segregated lunchroom when an American objected: it provoked useful meditation and investigation that wouldn’t have occurred without the outsider. Halle further reflected that, for Americans included in conversations here—because we don’t have a stake in conversations—questions can safely be received from us. We come from a place of curiosity without an agenda, and this allows people to answer honestly.

              The program facilitates conversations people otherwise wouldn’t dare begin.

Below: John and Roosevelt students at the end of the day.

Omagh, Enniskillen

              The fact that I’ve been with students so much of this time is wearing on me tonight. But I’ve left all of them and their thirteen buddies from Oakgrove, downstairs while I sit here with Barbara, cups of tea at hand, my ears too plugged up from the bus to take sudden screeching.

              Today we rode to Omagh and met Kat, whose father, Michael Gallagher, was the central figure of a movie my class had watched back at Roosevelt. Kat’s brother, Aiden, was one of 29 killed in a bomb left by the Real IRA to disrupt the Good Friday Agreement just then passed. We read poems and left remembrances and daffodils at the memorial, and did so too at a traffic circle in Enniskillen.

              There, John Harken quoted Rev. David Cupples, a minister who had to lead a service immediately after what was also called Inneskillen’s Poppy Day Massacre in 1987: "Faith is a refusal to panic." John has turned the other words, "All contact leaves a trace," into this one he gives at morning assembly: Our contact is never neutral—we either help or we harm. 

              On that day in 1987, Cupples also gave this prayer: May your life be the triumph of love over hate, hope over despair, and life over death.

    

From the Argument of Force to the Force of Argument

               When Jon McCourt left the main hall here where we’re staying in the St. Columb’s Park House last night at nine, our kids were thronging him. They didn’t know nor did I the quality and experience of the man John Harken had brought to us.

              He’s flown throughout the world to share his story, which is that of a children’s home and the high profile campaign he led to end their abuses, and no less the arc of murderous violence to peace—what he names as the argument of force to the force of argument. What follows is my record of his talk.

              When I stood on the street with a machine gun in my hand at 17 or 18, there was no other option. I turned 70 in December. The last 54 years of my life have been dedicated by the years before that. I grew up on the west side of the River Foyle. And since then, I’ve traveled the world. I’ve visited many of recent history’s conflict zones—Russia, Chechnya, the Balkans.

              I left the children’s home at 13 years of age. All the ten years before that I was shut behind a gate, behind a wall, behind a fence. They called people like us outsiders.

              This is how I arrived. At three years old, Ballykelly was the northern-most, western-most air force base in all of Europe. My father had been on a mission in the Second World War and was shot down, and yet he decided to join the air force again only to be hit by a car. When my older two brothers told my mother what had happened, my mother went into early labor, and she too ended up in the hospital. With no parents at home, we were sent into care. This was the decision of the parish priest and meant to be temporary.

              I’ll never forget the crunch of the gravel on the driveway in to the children’s home. This was a 280 acre farm, with huts in the back of a great, big Georgian house. When we arrived, one brother went up the stairs, another brother went down, and I went in through the front door. I didn’t see my brothers again for eight years.

              Every kind of abuse happened in that home. And every kind of abuse, I had either experienced myself or seen happen to someone else. The Sisters of Nazareth considered us defects of society, called us bastards. What we experienced at their hands caused a third of the children to take our own lives.

              As for myself, I learned that if I was sitting and reading a book when the nuns came into the room, they’d overlook me. I felt guilty that they went on to hurt someone else, but was glad in the moment at least it wasn’t me. The home averaged 120 children a year with two nuns running each of the three separate blocks. We all learned to keep our mouths shut.

              I learned the life of surviving and deception.

              It was a great teacher, Betty Johnson that got me interested in words on the page and in stories. I might have read a book twenty times, and I could just open the book to any page and just love where I was in it. I was fortunate to be a pretty good student; so when I left in 1965, I was ready for school outside. School was a breeze for me. Then, when I was 16 or 17, I started working with a friend’s father, one of the top welders in the country.

              I was in class for the first time with real, live Protestants. They weren’t trying to convert me at all; they just wanted to talk about girls and books and sport, which suited me fine.

              In the school, there was a room where you could get coffee and cigarettes, and I saw a poster for a civil rights march in Derry. Back at the home, I had the shit beat out of me and I was locked in a cellar just for reading the newspaper, and here was a civil rights march. And what was that? Civil rights? That’s Martin Luther King stuff. What are we talking about here, in Derry?

              So I ask about it, and start talking to a guy about housing, talking about jobs, about votes. My future’s already made out: I’m working with a welder, living in a place with a couple others. But I’m curious. I arranged to meet a Protestant friend across the river. We’re standing and chatting, and I realized the crowd there was going to a football match, not the march.

              Then I saw the grey trucks. I never saw so many police men in my life. Where I grew up, people weren’t afraid of police—they were afraid of the priests: if something went wrong, we didn’t go to police—we’d go to the priests. I heard a roar, and the roar I heard was police beating people at the march and firing their water cannons into the crowd. That was my introduction to civil rights in Ireland.

              By the time the march reached Guild Hall, the crowd had dwindled down to a hundred people as others went to the hospital or went home for dry clothes. A man was speaking about houses and jobs, and I was getting bored. 

              But then another man starts talking about Guild Hall, and he’s starting to make sense: At the partition of Ireland in 1922, Catholics made up 70% of the island. But gerrymandering ensured majorities were maintained by Protestants in the North. And here in Derry, too, gerrymandering of the North Ward versus the South Ward meant we had a nationalist majority by population but a unionist majority by council. Particularly after the Second World War, money was allocated for public housing, but they weren’t building houses for Catholics, and because only householders could vote, they kept Catholics out of the votes. As a direct result of that, I spent ten years in a children’s home. It took my mother ten years to get enough points to get a house and therefore to get us back.

              So I started marching; I started protesting; I started making signs and placards. I also started getting beaten by batons. I turned the other cheek, but at some point, there’s no cheek left to turn. I decided I couldn’t lie down anymore: I had to stand up.

              So then I started throwing stones; and that led to building barricades. From 1969 to 1972, we closed off the whole neighborhood of the Bogside to protect ourselves.

              This was not a religious conflict. This was a class conflict. This was a political conflict with religious fault lines.

              Well, one day, the police went into a home and beat someone to death. That was the first death. We strengthened our barricades. The police showed up and rocks were thrown. An armored car drove right at our barricade but it stopped him. We beat the police right out of the Bogside.

              But then the big green trucks came. The British army had arrived! Some people were so welcoming, they brought tea right out to them. But they were there to turn the bayonets on us and finish what the police had started. And that’s the day I joined the IRA.

              I lost friends and went to many, many funerals. And I was right in the middle of Bloody Sunday. On my right, a sixteen year old boy was shot. On my left, a bullet went through a man’s nose, but the adrenaline kept him moving forward. The third guy was on my sport team. I saw a soldier shoot him, put a bullet right through his spine—the soldier walked over and put one into his back. 

              All it took was eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes to turn this insurrection into a war.

              Three thousand people died as a direct result of Bloody Sunday. If it hadn’t happened, we could have finished this in the seventies. 1972, as you may know, was the bloodiest year of all. 497 people died. For you, that’s not many; the number of people who die in automobile accidents in America alone will dwarf that. But we’re a small nation of a million and a half people, and everyone knows everyone else. Everyone is someone’s friend and brother.

              They brought their war to us, and I didn’t care what the costs would be after this. I became actively engaged.

              But in 1976, I became sick with a lung infection because of the chemicals that had been used on us, and I was sent to a hospital on the other side of the border because they’d treat me there. I spent three months, a good long time to have a think. There had to be an alternative to war.

              By 1976, the old structure of the IRA had changed. The old guys had retired. I could leave. I had no control over the war. When I came back to Derry in 1977, the police who’d harassed me now left me alone.

              I wasn’t interested in all of Ireland. I was only interested in what we could do in Derry. A place burned down because a minister there had shaken hands with a priest was now rebuilt as a home for prayer and reconciliation, and this became a place for me.

              Here’s what I had been thinking: What is the greatest of all the commandments in the Bible? It is to love God with your whole heart and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. But what if you don’t even love yourself? The idea puts things in a very human context: you have to have your own self worth before you can begin to love another community.

              So I began to look to things that could be fixed in my community, removing the rubble and burnt out cars, painting over the graffiti, fixing fences and fixing the gates. That’s where it started. One day people see you with a gun in your hand and the next it’s a paintbrush and you’re talking peace. How do you make peace? You do it by engaging with people. I needed only a few things to do this, some rubbers and buckets of paint. I’m standing and painting, and people walk over and say, Jon, what are you doing? And then they start to helping. This is Tom Sawyer stuff, because soon enough, people are doing the painting. People are wanting to engage. They’re wanting to make change. And they’re starting to show up with their own paint brushes.

              These are the things that make the difference.

              We started planting trees, but then we’d come back and the trees had been pulled up. The kids are pulling up the trees. So I just walked over to the boys, just to talk to them, you know. I said, Give us a hand and plant these trees. And so they did. At one point, I saw these two kids beating the crap out of each other, and I said, What’s going on? And one of the boys said, He tried pulling up my tree!

              The argument of force will get you so far. But there has to be a point where the force of argument takes over.

              I went to Stormont for thirteen years to make the argument for an inquiry into abuse. And when it happened, when it was revealed what happened, when we looked into every single institution where children were placed, there were lots of tears, lots of disbelief. It was my greatest impact, and it happened with words.

              There’s nothing you’re hearing from me that you can’t take back to Seattle. What did I learn? How do you make a people feel like they’re worth something? There is the potential for what happened here in 1968 to happen in any city of the United States. Walk into a different community, it's awkward and scary, but it’s what makes a change possible.

Planting Seeds

              Roosevelt students didn’t know that they’d be leading two lessons when they arrived today. They had one hour to figure it out.

              Sixth graders were first, those cuties, and because John Harkin was insistent our workshop occur in the foyer of the school, we were soon blasting the premises with noise, our students building rock-paper-scissor trains and shouting names. A couple scouts were sent from upstairs to find out what in Heavens’ name was going on and returned with word that, Oh, it’s the Americans. I would have tried to tamp it down, but if John wanted us there in the foyer, right in the heart of the entrances and exits of the school, I figured he knew what he was getting. And indeed he did, smiling to see us so boisterous and joyful and bringing Oakgrove along, future HFBers, leaders, and healers.

              Our kids divided the crowd into smaller groups and then led more games and facilitated gently probing questions. I was so proud to see the Roosevelt students at work, taking charge and stepping up to the leadership, assured and inviting.

              Roosevelt was more
practiced explaining, playing, discussing with the second group, the eight graders; and when it was over, the accompanying teachers were disappointed that we weren’t taking kids for a double lesson, for all of the reasons.

              Two of our students said after the first lesson, I’m not sure what they got out of this. I was surprised anyone felt this way. I said that we weren’t doing this for the intellectual content or exchange of information: this was about getting students out of their comfort zone; this was about bonding and inclusion, and about being with you. It’s also about modeling bravery and leadership, and no less about warming up their experience with school (though students do seem much better connected to their community here than we back home). We were just playing, but those year eights and tens are likely to remember the experience with both curiosity and fondness.

              After lunch, we went to Ness Woods to plant trees. John was surprised by the number and variety of Oakgrove kids who suddenly took an interest in walking the muddy peat and planting trees.

              But oh, the sweeping countryside and heavy gray sky atop it. I’m only sorry our students missed the chance to perform Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” on the hill with their spades.

What do you call this country? What do you call this town?

              This morning, we teachers were tasked with meeting in the canteen with students whose instructors were out today. One of them was Protestant; the other four Catholic—which broadly represents the proportion in Derry/Londonderry. The boy were all pals. They’d tease each other, as they did me by asking what do you call this city, what do you call this country. But they said it didn’t matter to them much, the way it fiercely continued to do for their grandparents.

              Yet, when I probed further, they made clear there were neighborhoods they couldn’t without getting beat up. Well, this is what I want to know about, I said to them: What does it mean that you can call each other pals but can’t necessarily walk together into the same neighborhoods?

              The answer isn’t top of the mind. I’ve been asking many students why they’re here, in a religiously integrated school. Students rarely present this as a philosophical or political choice. Some had siblings here, or find it close to home; also, there’s no entrance test. One left St. Mary’s because it was too judge-y. Too judge-y? "It’s an all girls’ school,” a boy said, as if that explained it.

              Later, we heard more: Young People Leading Change brought us onto the open floor of the theater, where we first played mix-and-mingle games with the juniors (the young ones), and later engaged in the serious conversations with the older students, serving in many ways the same purpose. In these dialogues, which included discussions of identity, drug use, racism, and the police (a good segue for me to tell students that our visit to the police tomorrow couldn’t possibly happen tomorrow because of the shooting of an officer while he was coaching children in Omagh), the Oakgrove students and the Roosevelt students were separated to decide what they wanted to tell the other group about where you live. The older students described continued self-policing in communities by paramilitaries knee-capping drug dealers and “pedos,” and also continued separations and tension of religion.

              In the evening, we walked to the cultural center and crashed an Irish folk dancing class, outnumbering them with our students and the three Oakgrove kids who tagged along. They patiently taught us a couple steps and let us join for twenty minutes before we walked home, full of fiddle.

              Before that, some of the sixth form had joined us before dinner at a men’s homeless shelter, where some remained up to fifteen years, well past the statutory two allowed in public shelters. James, the man running the place, left us with these thoughts: If you put kindness out into the world, even if you don’t always get it back—if you’re open, and honest, you may not be able to help everyone or be thanked for what you do, but you can have a life you believe in.

West Belfast.

February 20, 2023

              Today we were led around West Belfast and heard from a panel of former paramilitaries and British police. In Shankill, Mark, a 24 year veteran of the British army, led us through the loyalist, unionist side of the wall; he handed us off across the gates to the nationalist, republican Falls Road side to Pader, who’d been 16 years imprisoned for killing an officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. At Tar Anall in the Conway Mill, we sat around a panel made up of Noel, a gunman for the Ulster Volunteer Force who also went to Long Kesh for murder; Lee, a veteran of British infantry who’d served two tours in Northern Ireland at checkpoints and watchtowers; and Michael, now of Sinn Fein and formerly of the Irish Republican Army, who spent another 16 years at Long Kesh for murder.

              Mark presented an unapologetic, severe argument for British Northern Ireland: to reunify Northern Ireland, the IRA was willing to destroy its economy, its buildings, its morale, its grandmamas, kiddies and babies, and the murderers and terrorists—responsible for specific, knowable deaths and horrors—are now in Stormont, in charge; meanwhile, the Brits of Northern Ireland only ever wanted to keep homes and people safe. In a few months, the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement will arrive, and, he asked, what has it brought us?

              He came by his bitterness honestly—both his father and brother murdered, and his own body the target of three killing attempts, resulting in a seven month coma, prosthetics, and the loss of two toes. Mark succeeded in driving home the question that Alice later asked Pader, our IRA tour guide: is the violence endured by civilians seen as justified? Why can’t we reconcile? Mark says, beating his head: the memories. Beating his chest: the heartache.

              The most powerful and undeniable thing Mark described was that wall and its effects: On one side, 100% of the people are Protestant; on the other, 100% Catholic. Not a single Catholic on the Protestant side, he claimed, and not a Protestant to be found among the other. Everyone locked in by the wall, everyone locked out, the gates slamming shut every night at nine. Each side has its own shops, its own schools and nurseries, its own churches and even its own buses. Before 1969, Mark said, we shared drinks, friendships, and handshakes. Now there’s the wall, seven kilometers long and three meters thick, its first brick laid in 1971. And has it fixed anything? No, we just keep building it higher. First in ’93, and then, the Good Friday Agreement, did it mean the wall could come down? No, in 1998, they just raised it higher. The children are playing in their own playgrounds and taking lessons in their own schools. The kiddies aren’t playing, nor praying, nor eating, or learning together. The next generation is already locked in.

             The idea of separateness is incredibly vivid. And when he toured us through the central blocks of Shankill Road, its angry murals a little like the martyrs’ row on the other side but also bellowing in its thick-font accusations (“PROBABLY THE UK’S WORST EVER PRIME MINISTER AND HIS CABAL IN THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY,” “SINN FEIN/IRA VERSUS ISIS,” “SINN FEIN/IRA’S SLAUGHTER,” “CHILDREN MURDERED BY SINN FEIN,” “30 YEARS OF INDISCRIMINATE SLAUGHTER BY THE SO-CALLED NON-SECTARIAN IRISH FREEDOM FIGHTERS”), I thought very much of those children raised here in their segregated homes, shopping and walking all their young lives through the vitriol of victimization.

              Mark walked us through the gates that would close at night and open at seven each morning and took us to Pader. Mark wanted us to face the full impact of the horrors he described in the tradition of a fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian, and he had the desired effect, leaving us unable to make eye contact with another human being. That’s how Pader found us, long faces, cast down.

              Pader provided not only a contrast in perspectives but demeanor, giving nods to us and laughing, and calling out to all the passersby. Haven’t seen you in a bit, Pader. Yeah, cuz’ I’ve been avoidin’ ya! Heya, Pader? How are ya? Magic, Patrick. Magic. Just telling them all about how ya fucked the British all on yer own.

              But the things Pader was describing were dead serious, too. The contrasts he provided to Mark’s story were several. First, he and other nationalists were insistent that their argument was not about religion but colonialist occupation. We saw this in the murals up and down Falls road—images touching on Palestinian plight, American civil rights and South African anti-apartheid heroes, Cuban revolutionaries, and many other peoples rising up against post-colonial structures. Second, he and other nationalists shared the argument that they were fighting back against the most sophisticated government and military in the world, and as such, violent acts were acts of war and political in nature.

              We would hear from Duncan Morrow of Ulster University the next day, who would describe it this way: Each side says, We can’t trust the other. Here’s the proof: Awful things They did to us. And here are heroic things we did to defend ourselves: no recognition that their awful acts and our heroic acts are the same—you did it because you believed what you were fighting was much worse.

              We left the separated tours for an integrated panel discussion with Michael, Noel, and Lee.

              Michael Culbert was a distinguished, good looking man with deep laugh lines who now works with Sinn Fein and engages others in dialogue and reconciliation. Also he’s a man who, while working as a social worker during the day, directed violence and destruction, and continues to hold sway now. And as truly appreciative and respecting he was of Noel and Lee, Michael—or Mickey as the other men called him—he seemed to suggest peace was a strategy rather than a driving principle. When Alice asked the men if they had any regrets, Michael said in a line to which students would return again and again, “I regret that I got caught.” At the time, we laughed: he had told so many jokes, was so kindly teasing of Noel and Lee. But he wasn’t laughing when he said it. He said, I’m sad for the families of the British forces I killed, but I have no regret for taking part in the anticolonial struggle. Then he went back to joking: I regret that Henry VIII went and got that divorce, is what I regret.

              Noel was a diminutive, sweet looking man who was described by another this way. Lovely man. Lovely. Brutal murderer. This article about Noel is eye-opening and made me think again and again of Sayre and Noel joyfully talking about their passion as footballers. Noel’s path from bitter violence to mentor of peace was long and hard won, and now he questions the very meaning of Britishness.

              Lee was a working class British soldier who served terms in Northern Ireland and programmed to follow orders and to see the entire Catholic civilian population as IRA and as the guilty enemy. During the cease fire of 1994, he started reading again and reacted strongly to British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling’s phrase “acceptable level of violence” in Northern Ireland. A road through heroin, homelessness, and history (that is, a PhD in American history) brought him to work like these panel discussions, to unravel people’s narratives of conflict.

              The three men said some common things: Peace is the way forward, and no one wants to go back to the violence. The real issue is not religion, but economic opportunity. If they’d replaced the factory at Mackey’s with a university, as once was maybe going to happen, rather than a wall, if someone had invested and provided both educational and economic opportunities rather than spending all that money on the Titanic Museum, what might have happened for these two communities? 

Belfast Castle

 Belfast Castle

              We are now sitting together, in chairs and on the floor in the Fishwick Room of the Belfast Castle, a place that has had several incarnations starting in the 12^th century and that passed through various barons and lords and all this implies, but now seems, by its stackable convention-style chairs, to serve as a wedding and conference center of sorts. No historical tours today—just a hike up Cavehill and a lunch on a bluff overlooking Belfast Harbor and the estuary of the River Lagan, the yellow cranes Samson and Goliath nestled below.

              While some of the students on the hike looked sadly at their white shoes getting spattered in the wet Irish mud, the arrival at the cave of Cavehill was joyous, students facing the basalt cliffs in one direction, and the rolling hill that drops away to the view of the trees and water below in the other. Several bouldered up to the mouth of the cave while we cheered them on; and then we ate lunch up the layered slope, a terraced garden of us planted with the sacks of sandwiches, Toto crisps, and Double Decker candy bars the hostel prepared for us.

  

              This morning was also a jubilant group exertion for students who joined me on a run to the Titanic museum, stopping at churches and public art and a vivid sunrise just behind the twin cranes we were to see again from above. 

              Yesterday at tea time, Janine, Barbara, and I sat before a large window at the Ulster Museum, a wall separating us from the others. Janine marveled at the way Michael so happily communed with the students, at which point I became hyperaware of that wall and sought to come out from behind it.

              I joined the students just as Michael was explaining the tech metaphor of bug-versus-feature, and then gave an example that was its own provocation to interrogate the culture at Roosevelt High School: before we left, a couple students vandalized the room of a gay teacher with clear homophobic and misogynistic intent. We discussed with urgency and heat, but over an intimate table and cups of tea, so different from a classroom with its power dynamics and captive assembly.

              One of the important things about a trip like this is the way it changes the texture of relationships between younger adults and the older ones. As I was discussing with Chloe and Makayla earlier in the morning, there’s now such competition for university admissions and scholarship money—thus for the accolades of pedigreed programs and sports clubs as well as upmarket course titles—grades necessarily supersede curiosity and learning. Chloe was surprised that teachers notice and are saddened by students immersed in an unreflecting grind. But it grieves us. And no small result of this grind is that teachers are more gatekeeper than fellow learner, fellow citizen.

              Here in our travels, where we eat at tables together, wait on buses together, walk the streets and trails, lounge on stones and chairs together, we weave casually in and out of conversations about the world that affect us all as well as the school and classrooms that are a deep common experience. The falling barrier is an entry into adulthood—fellowship and the ability to approach authority, and no less our shared responsibility to unfinished communal existence.

              In the Fishwick Room, we reflect on what we’ve observed in Northern Ireland so far. Taylor and Halle remark how little they’ve seen of the unionist-nationalist tensions. But Barbara reports how women on our train ride told her it’s time to move forward, move forward, move forward: perhaps we don’t know what we see (or don’t) as new visitors to a place, but perhaps, too, there’s much hidden in the attempt to move on. Barbara later will tell the story of a cab driver who, when hearing why we are here, says, You want the Irish history? I’ll tell you the history. Stop studying it! In a few hours, we will discuss this over dinner: how do divided peoples in a nation steeped in trauma begin to heal? Might it, in fact, need a can’t-we-all-just-get-along moment before honestly acknowledging and addressing pain?

              Below us, about forty men and women in their forties to seventies have gathered for traditional Irish dancing while we, upstairs, go around the room with our solemn thoughts, reels and jigs vibrating the floor. In a moment, we will go downstairs and then be beckoned into the ballroom to watch. A man will tell Sayre and Steffi about the couples and pairs dancing, about the steps and history; we will think about what it means to have Irish dancing in what was many times a lord's manor house. For the few minutes at the wall of the ballroom, taking in this unexpected, rousing gift, we will smile and lightly stomp along.

Easing in to understanding: Northern Ireland

 February 18, 2023

              Students appreciate the light start to our experience with Northern Ireland: while they’ve been looking forward to corporeally engaging the history and tension we’ve studied, I know there’s no small trepidation for the emotionality and weight to come.

              We therefore enjoyed the festive shopping at St. George’s Market, Maddie sharing a crepe stuffed with cream and chocolate, Abbey happily taking the tags off a woolen scarf; and later, in the Ulster Museum, students were wowed by the layers of exhibits: first history and natural history, and then geology, and elements, and biology, and fashion, and art--studying the effects Rembrandt etchings proudly displayed bore out on Irish and Northern Irish artists that followed, or learning that the fierce dragons of straw suspended atop the five-story atrium had been fashioned by the museum’s resident basket weaver, or hearing the facts Eddie knew of the massive Irish wolfhound encased in plexiglass on the ground floor. They enjoyed the grand ceilings in the rotunda of City Hall and its careful exhibits of city history.

              Students also were glad to acclimate to some of the small cultural details without the full weight of the troubled history, like which way to look when crossing a street and which side to travel on a sidewalk, and the difference between a cuppa (mug with tea bag) and proper tea (brewed loose), and odd old sayings, like the one that describes a dreamer as a head full of sweetie mice, or the absurd detail that the harp on the Irish flag points a direction opposite that of the iconic harp on a pint of Guinness, Guinness having trademarked the logo first. It’s a no-worries culture, or so we’ve seen.

              And yet, there have been signs of the tensions always at hand. As one side said, We have a shared past, but we don’t have a shared memory. We saw this in the dozen Union Jack flags raised above the City Hall fence over card tables with small posters, and saw it again in numerous murals and partisan  posters throughout our walks. We heard it in small moments, as when Janine was inquiring about a bus and was asking about Londonderry—a guess based on the man’s name and geography—and he responded, Never heard of it, and then told her, when she re-oriented to the nationalist name Derry, Yes, we’re the smart ones. We heard it again when the hosteler last night said he was surprised an American school came to this city to learn more about the history of Ireland, whoops, I mean Belfast. It was even there in the blackboard used in an episode of Derry Girls, when it was a funny-ha that Catholic students and Protestant students were brought together, first to come up with the differences between them and then the similarities, but there was only room for the difference.

              City Hall judiciously addressed the city’s storied tensions by avoiding a couple decades in the late twentieth century but pointing to roots of division. And the Ulster Museum had a direct exhibit about the Troubles, spanning many rooms and many more feelings.

              Belfast is a city with familiar weather, language, and shops. But we sense something all around us.

A link to an album of this trip is attached here.

Belfast hostel takeover

              I am in Northern Ireland for the first time, arriving a few hours ago in Belfast on a train from Dublin. Makayla says we maybe should have let the people with fewer and smaller bags load the train ahead of us, because, there we were, a gaggle of Americans gumming it up as we waited one by one to haul our big American bags and stuffed packs into the passenger car and lift forty to fifty pounds airborne into the overhead shelf above our heads while conductors whistled helplessly outside behind us. I joined three students on the floor at the back when there weren’t enough seats.

              We had flown overnight and chased the sun to a very early sunrise, though some of us slept. I was grumpy for a while because I felt like someone kept jabbing my seat. When I was able to turn around, I said, Hello! I just wanted to tell you that solitaire might not be as solitary as you think! I did sleep for a couple hours myself.

              The two blocks walk from the train to the hostel was dark and rainy. I sat at a table with four of our girls at dinner a few minutes later, our bags stowed in a luggage room until we finished, then given pizza squares and the smallest salad you ever saw. And then we were surprised when another course came out, huge burgers in loaves of their own and a bin of chips for each of us—and yet another one of those microscopic salads.

              We had two hours at the train station in Dublin. I played guitar by our bags while students wandered and I made sure to keep my case shut so police and guards would know I wasn’t busking but just busy being American. The walk from where the airport shuttle dropped us and the train station put us almost at the door of the hotel I’d stayed with Frankie, Kent, and Emily almost a dozen years ago, and a 15 minute walk from the station took me to the Spire and the General Post Office, famously occupied in 1916 by Republicans in what would soon lead to the independence of Ireland and the Troubles after that. But first, we had our first real encounter with Ireland when Janine forlornly faced a broken escalator at Dublin’s train depot: men took the suitcases from Janine and Barbara and carried them up the steps for them with a “No worries” fare-thee-well.

              It is now 2:18 pm in Seattle, and almost time for bed checks here in Belfast. We'd hoped to be knocked out by the not sleeping, and so, to quickly adjust, but I feel ready to go.

A link to an album of this trip is attached here.